When You Reach Me

Things That Open

We take the bus home because we think it’ll be so much fun to take the bus home, knowing that we are rich now and can take a cab anytime we want. And it is fun. Sal and I don’t talk much, but we lean into the turns the way we used to when we were little and actually believed that we could make the bus tip over.

After Mom won her ten thousand dollars, she played another speed round. But this time she had to be partners with the other celebrity.

“He wasn’t as dumb as a bag of hair,” Mom says on the bus, “but he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer either.” They lost. But Mom gets to keep her ten thousand dollars, and her twenty-one-hundred-dollar cash bonus. “Not bad for a day’s work,” she says, smiling at me. “Not bad at all.”

When we get to the lobby, Louisa has to change into her uniform for work.

“Want to watch some TV?” Sal asks me.

I tell him I would love to. Another time.

Upstairs, Mom puts on a record, and she and Richard dance for a while in the living room while I sit on the couch and grin, just watching them.

Then I go to my room, shut my door, and pull the box out from under my bed. Right on top of everything is a big envelope for Mom—Richard gave it to me a week ago for safekeeping. And underneath it is Richard’s birthday present.

Mom is in the kitchen, making birthday tacos and a box cake. Every once in a while she yells, “Whoo-hoo! We’re rich!”

I write on Mom’s envelope with a marker: I personally do not care about wall-to-wall carpeting. Louisa says carpets are full of dust mites anyway.

I make an origami frog for Richard and put it on top of his box.

I make an origami frog for Mom and put it on top of her envelope.

I can’t get enough of these origami frogs.

It’s time for dinner. We eat the tacos. We sing. We cut the cake.

I give Mom her envelope. “What’s this?” she says. “It’s not my birthday!”

She admires her frog. She reads my note about the carpeting and the dust mites and gives me a funny look. She opens the envelope, which is full of applications for law school.

She looks at them. “But—I can’t…” Then she sits back in her chair and says, “Wow.”

This was our secret plan all along. Mine and Richard’s.

I give Richard his present. He admires his frog and puts it on the table next to Moms frog so that their little frog feet are touching. He opens the box. Inside are two keys, one for the lobby door and one for the apartment. I made a key ring for them—it’s a sailor’s knot, two strands, pulled tight. He knows how to untie it, of course, but I don’t think he will.